Shikhar Dhawan dazzled at the top with 76 that propelled India to 303/6

Kohli has hit a golden phase in which he seems to do nothing wrong...

IN CAPE TOWN Michael Holding has seen players who could do nothing wrong with the bat in certain phases of their careers. Is Virat Kohli one among them? “May be, but he was not great with the bat in the Tests,” the West Indian great says curtly. “He is in a great touch in the ODIs though.”

But Holding remembers Viv Richards of 1976 who had gone into a different zone with the bat. “Just against England, he had scored over 800 runs. There may be others like that. I’m not a stats buff but Viv was unstoppable that year,” Holding recollects.

Holding may have a point but Kohli did not do too badly in the Tests. After failing in the first Test here at the Newlands, he had scored a century in the second Test at Centurion in a losing cause and then had scores of 54 and 41, which were crucial to India’s win at the Wanderers.

In the ODIs so far, he could, well, have had three centuries on the trot but for the tiny target at Centurion where he had remained 46 not out. The other two scores have been 112 (Durban) and 160 not out here in Newlands. Yesterday’s was 34th ODI century which was 55th international three-figure score.

But there is a larger picture to his ODI heroics. In the last 50 ODIs since 2015, he has had 2853 runs at an average of 73.15. His current career ODI average is 57.34, the highest for players who have played more than 50 games. Unstoppable? Well, sort of.

During the unbeaten knock here yesterday, a Newlands official said India’s total won’t reach 300 because “Kohli doesn’t play well in the air. He does well only along the ground,” the official said. India were 24 runs away from that mark with only two overs left in the innings. The India skipper hammered two sixes in those two overs and made sure the total crossed the psychological 300-run mark. The official said ‘magician.’

The two sixes, however, are just a footnote in Kohli’s batting at Newlands in particular and in South Africa in general during this tour. There is a method in the way he has been batting and that is staying ‘two steps’ ahead of the game, as he himself would say. He knew Kagiso Rabada would bowl that particular delivery short in the final over. He stayed inside the crease and pulled it over mid-wicket fence.

Two steps ahead? Well may be. Some also call it game sense. When other batsmen hit the ball in the air – be it Ajinkya Rahane or even MS Dhoni – it could often end up in the hands of the fielders. But Kohli’s shots – in the current golden phase -- would cross the fence.

Holding is not the only legend who thinks that batsmen do get into a ‘golden’ phase where they can’t do anything wrong. Barry Richards remembers a few such instances here in South Africa, albeit in first class cricket. “It has become a universal fallacy that people tend to think cricket started only when television happened to the game. There were many players who have been the so-called run-machines, just that many don’t know about that. I had five centuries in six games and Mike Procter had six on six. But Kohli is different. He is a class player. He is getting runs in every format and looks capable of scoring runs every time he comes out. Not too many Indian batsmen have managed to score here in South Africa so consistently,” the SA legend says.

So how can one achieve that touch? “There can be many attributes to this spell. You need passion, desire, skills and luck,” Barry says.

Kohli, of course, has all that and much more and that is the reason he is in that zone as Richards was in 1976. For the record, only Rohit Sharma has a better 50-match phase than Kohli, having scored 2990 runs in the period 2014-17.

Now for Holding’s point of 1976. Richards had amassed 1926, including eight hundreds, in all formats, that year. Not for nothing he is called King Richards but such ‘coronation’ of Kohli should be round the corner too. He has been unstoppable for quite some time.

India go 3-0 up

#CAPE TOWN India thrashed South Africa by 124 runs in the Cape Town ODI to take a 3-0 lead in the series. Responding to India’s 303/6, South Africa folded for 179. Once again Kuldeep Yadav and Yuzvendra Chahal were the architects of India’s win taking four wickets each.

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